LASD Board Highlights

Gardner Bullis students presented information about Lunch Clubs at their school. Although there are teacher mentors for each club, the Lunch Clubs are student led. Students come up with their own activities for their club, empowering students to explore their interests.

Students from the Green Club shared information about how they implemented a composting program at their school for lunch scraps.

The School Newspaper club explained how they wrote stories to help bring their school community together by providing information to help people get to know each other. For example, they wrote a story featuring students and their pets. They also wrote stories about school staff, featured book recommendations and provided a detailed explanation of four square rules to reduce conflicts on the playground.

The Gardner Gives Back Club has organized many projects to support the community in various ways. One project encouraged students to bring spare change to school to support Rise Against Hunger. Students also worked with Rise Against Hunger volunteers to pack 15,000 meals in two hours! Other projects supported Project Night Night and Hope's Corner. One student explained, "We love to be part of Gardner Gives Back because we get to make a difference in the world. We get to help our community in many different ways."

The Los Altos School District started its own teacher induction program two years ago. The program is in its initial accreditation phase with the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. Having this program in-house at LASD means new teachers build their skills and complete their credentials with the LASD model of instruction. It provides a seamless transition for new teachers entering our classrooms.

We've also been focusing on best practices in Transitional Kindergarten instruction to provide excellent social-emotional and foundational academic skills in this critical early learning experience for our youngest students. Our Transitional Kindergarten team of educators recently had the opportunity to visit the San Jose State Lab Preschool to learn from expert early educators about best practices in early childhood education. We're already beginning to implement some of what we learned to continuously improve our excellent Transitional Kindergarten Program.

For more information about our culture of continuous growth and learning, even among our team of educators here in LASD, take a look at the Board meeting video.

By law, LASD is required to provide school facilities for Bullis Charter School (BCS) students who reside within LASD boundaries. With 10 schools on 9 sites, over the years this has resulted in significant encroachments on the Blach and Egan school campuses, with resulting impacts on the operations of those schools. LASD has been working diligently towards a solution to the challenges of school site sharing that will protect its high quality academic model.

At the March 18 meeting, Superintendent McGonagle provided additional information the Board had requested regarding the costs of housing BCS on the Blach and Egan campuses in portable classrooms and facilities. Some costs have been one-time costs to purchase classrooms, others are ongoing costs as many of the portables are rentals.

The Board will continue to discuss the long term plan for housing BCS at its future meetings.

Board members Jessica Speiser and Vaishali Sirkay provided an update for the Board and community regarding their meeting with representatives from Bullis Charter School around a long-term facilities solution to house the charter school.

Mrs. Speiser stated that, in the course of the most recent discussion, BCS expressed an openness to moving a portion of its program to the 10th site, with a smaller footprint at one of the junior high schools due to the structure of their academic program and number of currently enrolled students.

Mrs. Speiser and Mrs. Sirkay have already scheduled a follow up meeting with BCS representatives at the 10th site in April, so that they can look at potential schematics of the site.